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April 18, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
19:54
Episode 498 Scott Adams: Obstruction of a Witch Hunt, Mental Health Crisis, Dale, More
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I'm back!
Yeah.
Yeah, you can't get enough of me today.
Or I can't get enough of myself.
One of those two things is definitely true.
And I've already moved to tea.
I've had enough coffee.
But man, I keep toasting all day.
It's toasting, toasting, toasting.
So I've got some updates on this whole Mueller report thing.
My prediction was that the world would divide into two movies and everybody would see what they want.
I just turned off Chris Cuomo saying that it's absolutely proven that it was not a witch hunt.
The one thing Chris Cuomo says you must acknowledge is that now there's no question about it.
This was no witch hunt.
Wasn't it? Wasn't it?
Yeah, I get that there were people who took some meetings, but once you've looked at it all and you find no crimes from the president or anybody really close to him that mattered, from the president's perspective, from his personal perspective, it was a witch hunt.
I don't think you get to say, well, what about Papadopoulos?
What about Paul Manafort doing completely unrelated things?
Wait a minute. Wait a minute.
I think you're forgetting Paul Manafort doing completely unrelated things.
How about that? Are you forgetting that in your witch hunt?
Witch hunt? Stupid.
Read the Mueller report.
It is full of Of damning evidence of all the crimes he didn't commit, the President I'm talking about.
There are so many of them.
Now, I know what you're thinking.
Individually, if you were to look at any one of the things in the Mueller report, it wouldn't mean anything, individually.
But if you add together all of the things that don't mean anything, Simple math tells you that 10 times 0 is 100.
So, there you go.
Scene. So, apparently the anti-Trumpers are trying to cling to their last shred of sanity.
And the thing that I keep looking at is the tone of distress When the CNN folks are trying to make their points.
They look like...
They look deranged.
Just the tone, the way they have stress in their voice.
Have you noticed it?
Let me give you two different versions.
First version will be somebody simply reporting the news.
Well, today Bill Barr...
It reported that there was no collusion and no obstruction.
There were a number of things that Mueller looked at, they thought were worth looking at, but when he put it all together, there was nothing there.
See, that would be a person who does not have a mental health crisis.
Now let me do everybody on CNN. But do you see?
There was definitely no one.
We don't. This was no one.
It wasn't. It wasn't.
There were so many bad things the president did in there.
He talked to people. He said things.
He considered things.
He considered things! Are you telling me that it doesn't count that he considered things?
Let me get my sarcastic face on.
So, you say there's nothing in the Mueller report?
Did you forget that Sarah Sanders once said something at a press conference that later she said wasn't exactly accurate?
Come on! That should have been jail time right there!
Jail time! Scene.
So, yeah, I just turned off Chris Cuomo.
And they're agitated.
And they're angry that other people are suggesting that there wasn't something here.
But the president may have, in fact, tried to obstruct a witch hunt.
And the president was the only person who knew for sure, no doubt about it, because the president knew what he did or didn't do.
No one else in the world could be sure.
But the president could be sure he knew what he did, and he knew what he didn't do.
So there was no chance that he was obstructing justice because he had knowledge that no one else had, which is there was no justice to be obstructed.
That, at least from his own perspective, he hadn't done anything.
Now, if you say, oh, Scott, you're forgetting all of those minor players who lied to investigators, and what about that meeting?
Blah, blah, blah.
What's your best point?
Give me your laundry list and I'll tell you.
Let's take your best point on the laundry list.
What's your strongest point in that Mueller report?
Just pick one. Pick your very worst thing.
It's nothing. Everything else is less important than that.
Here's my favorite one from today.
So apparently McGahn quit, the president's lawyer quit, because he quit because Trump asked him to fire Comey?
I don't know, it doesn't matter.
From one point it doesn't matter what he asked him to do.
But the story is that Barr didn't want to do what the president wanted him to do, because it probably would have crossed the line into abstraction of justice.
So Barr offered to quit.
Now, when the public looks at a story like this, they see it completely differently than rich people see it.
Let me tell you how rich people see the same story.
And I'm going to speak as an official rich person.
Who has had lots of lawyer contact, lots, lots of lawyer contact, for every, all manner of things, from, you know, legal problems to, not my own as it turns out, but all kinds of things.
And I can tell you, I have personally Had lawyers threaten to quit.
And by threaten to quit, I mean that they would say in clear terms, the thing you're suggesting, I could not possibly be part of.
Because it would be illegal, and I don't want to be involved in an illegal thing.
So, what did I do when my lawyers said, I will quit if you need to do that, because I can't be part of that.
I said... Okay, now I understand.
I understand, you know, the level of gravity.
I understand that this is a hard stop.
Now here's another thing that poor people who don't work with lawyers a lot don't understand.
Your lawyer works for you and is generally more cautious than you are.
So the process of working with a lawyer about anything complicated is you're pushing your lawyer all the time.
Because the lawyer is trying to make sure that there's zero chance of risk But the business person or the politician is not only concerned with legal risk.
They're concerned with everything from their brand to the politics of it to how it looks to, you know, the business end of it, etc.
So if you're not pushing your lawyer all the time to get them off their position, you haven't figured out how to deal with a lawyer.
If you take your lawyer's advice and just go, boom, okay, lawyer said, I guess that's what I'll do, sometimes it makes perfect sense to do that.
Sometimes the lawyer will tell you something and you'll say, well, I don't have a feeling about this one way or another.
Of course, I'll do what the lawyer says.
I don't have a better idea. But there are all kinds of situations, and I've been in a lot of them, where the lawyer says, you only want to go this far Because this is where your risk is the lowest.
And I say, great, I understand what you're saying.
I completely get what you're saying.
And now we're going to go this far.
And the lawyer says, just remember I told you, but I acknowledge that there are other factors besides the legal risk.
There's also the business upside, etc.
I would like to stress that I've never broken the law in terms of working with my lawyer.
Because the lawyer never lets that happen.
That's what they do. And if they have to threaten to quit, sometimes that's the only thing that can make you stop pushing them.
Because you don't want to have to go get another lawyer.
So threatening to quit, if you're a lawyer, and you're dealing with a rich person, and it's a bit complicated situation, as this situation was, It's very routine.
It's very routine for a lawyer to quit or threaten to quit.
It's not unusual in that world.
By the way, the way that we know that we're living in a simulation is that the same characters get reused.
You know, if you're watching a movie, You say, oh, there's my favorite actor in that movie.
But then you can watch another movie.
No, that's the same actor.
Same actor was in that other movie.
But you're okay with that, because you know it's fiction.
But every time we watch one of these legal situations, Michael Avenatti gets involved.
Apparently he was trying to get involved in the Jussie Smollett case too, to represent the two brothers.
And I think, this must be some kind of simulation.
Because we would have more characters.
Don't you think we would have more characters in our plays, if it were real?
I mean, there are six billion people.
You could throw in a new lawyer every now and then.
It doesn't have to be...
I mean, even Bill Barr is sort of a rerun.
You know, Donald Trump was already famous.
Like, you see, the simulation is just reusing characters.
You know, what would happen if a cartoonist...
That you do as a cartoonist suddenly starts talking about politics.
Well, it's because you're in a simulation.
The simulation only has, you know, a certain number of characters and the rest are just NPCs.
So you have to reuse the real characters so you don't have to program a gazillion people.
Sorry, I didn't mean to get off the subject.
One of the questions I have about this Mueller stuff, is there some suggestion that the president's tweets Could have been interpreted as obstruction of justice.
To which I say, I'm no lawyer, but you can't tell me that a tweet in public from the president could ever be obstruction of justice.
Now again, I'm no lawyer, so if Alan Dershowitz tells me tomorrow, oh yeah, it could totally be obstruction of justice, I'll just change my mind to whatever he says.
But I can't believe that in a world where you can give your feelings in social media, you can give your opinions, you can even lie on social media.
You can do anything except, I suppose, whatever would be the specific kinds of problems like defaming somebody or something like that.
We're making, you know, product claims that aren't real.
I suppose you could find some things that are illegal, but I can't imagine the saying you think something's a witch hunt or somebody should get fired or even talking about the possibility of pardons.
As long as you're saying it in public, how in the world could that be obstruction of justice?
He's saying it in public.
And pardons exist.
Everybody was talking about it.
Is the president the only person who can't talk about pardons?
Literally everybody was talking about pardons.
At least, you know, the concept of it.
So I can't in any way imagine that the law would ever come down on the side that a president tweeting in public his opinion or his feelings could ever be anything but free speech.
I just can't say it. But I could also have my mind changed in about A second and a half if Alan Dershowitz disagrees with me.
Somebody said he absolutely can obstruct justice in public.
Well, you'd have to give me an example that would be relevant to this case.
I can imagine some different case where maybe that's a possible situation I haven't thought of.
But for this situation, I don't see that the Supreme Court would ever go down on the side of that.
Well, you can't obstruct justice technically if there's no crime, but the reality of a president being convicted for that, when you could see that he was trying to get past it so he could do his job as president for the people, The odds of getting...
the odds of getting prosecuted for that are about zero.
Flynn pardoned.
Yeah, it seems like...
It does seem to me that a Flynn pardon is likely.
So I would say more likely than not.
You'll see a Flynn pardon.
Here.
So some of you might be aware of, I had this weird situation on the internet, and I'm not going to name the person involved, but let's just say there's an internet personality who believed for much of yesterday or whatever, or was it the day before, he believed that he and I were in some kind of a debate or having an argument online.
And because he believed it was happening, it wasn't happening, but since he believed it was, he believed it was, then people poured on to tell me that he had destroyed me, and what was it?
He flattened me in the comments.
To which I said, I'm in a conversation with him.
I didn't even know we were talking about anything.
And so masses of people came to believe that we had had some kind of a disagreement on facts, and I don't even know what they would be, and that we had had some kind of conflict, and that people were taking sides, and then they started attacking me.
And the whole time I kept thinking, Who is he?
Who is he?
I don't even know who he is.
I mean, I know, like, his name, but I don't know anything about him or why I care.
Somebody made a simple comment about how his Periscope statistics were hard to explain.
And I said, yeah, some comment to the effect of that it's unlikely.
And here's what was unlikely.
It was that I've got 80,000 followers on Periscope and I get about 20,000 people watching each Periscope.
So 80,000 people to get about 20,000 people who watch each Periscope.
This other person would get about 5,000 viewers and still get 20,000 watchers.
To which I said, that looks unlikely.
Now I don't know what the explanation is that.
And it could be that there's a perfectly simple explanation.
And if there's a simple explanation, I'd say, oh, okay.
But on the surface, it just looks unlikely that those numbers could make sense.
And his response, which he said, quote, flattened me, was he showed a screenshot of The minutes that people are watching his periscope, which wasn't even the topic, so he responded with something that was a completely different topic and declared victory, and then I had to watch this huge mental health outpouring of people who said, yeah, he got ya!
You know, take the loss, Scott!
He nailed ya!
He just made an idiot of you!
You know, you might as well admit he just flattened you!
And the whole time I was saying, I don't even think I'm in a conversation.
I don't even know what this is about.
I talked about something and he talked about something else and then declared victory.
So I guess I got owned.
I got owned. And then he...
And then he came up with the weasel move that, ah, it was all a clever trick, Scott.
Don't you know that the real trick was to get your followers over there, and then they would follow me, and I picked up followers.
To which I thought, well, good for you.
I don't care. Good for him if he picked up some followers.
So don't know who he is, don't know why I care.
I just know that he imagined he was in some kind of a conversation with me and he won.
He totally won the imaginary contest that we didn't have.
All right. Yeah, so Nadler, have you seen the video?
I think Scavino tweeted it out and it showed Jerry Nadler, the old Jerry Nadler and the new one.
And I have to give Jerry Nadler credit because...
It looked like, in the 90s or whatever, it looked like he was seriously overweight, and now he's maybe half of the size?
He probably weighs half of what he weighed in the 90s.
So, first thing is, congratulations.
Good job. But what I want to know is, if he lost half of his body weight in that many years, how long would we have to wait before he's completely gone?
So, so far he's half gone, but I'm really looking forward to the other half, how long it takes him to shrink down to nothing.
And then people will say, where's old Nads?
Does anybody see old Nads?
No, he just sort of disappeared.
He just shrunk down.
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